Religion & politics

Meredith Tax has been a prominent feminist voice and political activist since the late 1960s. She is the author of several books including The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917, Double Bind: The Muslim Right, The Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, and A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State, as well as two historical novels, Rivington Street and Union Square. Her 1969 essay “Woman and her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life” helped influence the US women’s liberation movement.

Anissa Hélie is an assistant professor at John Jay College in New York. Her articles include “Multiculturalist Liberalism and Harms to Women: Looking Through the Issue of the ‘Veil’” and “Policing gender, sexuality and ‘Muslimness’” in the book Sexuality in Muslim Contexts: Resistance and Restrictions, which she co-edited with Homa Hoodfar.

Secularism is a women's issue: an interview with Marieme Helie-LucasAWLSun, 02/04/2018 - 19:00

Marieme Helie Lucas is an Algerian sociologist and the founder and former International Coordinator of the “Women Living Under Muslim Laws” international solidarity organization. Helie Lucas also is the founder of “Secularism is a Women’s Issue.” Helie Lucas has long been a critic of Western human rights organizations’ sole focus on the crimes of the state as opposed to the crimes of non-state actors. She is a fierce champion of secularism in governance and a harsh critic of all forms of religious fundamentalism.

The partition of India and the Indian bourgeoisieAWLWed, 08/23/2017 - 11:42

In August 1947, when Britain left India, the country was partitioned, creating independent Dominions of India and Pakistan (now Pakistan and Bangladesh). In the process the provinces of Bengal and Punjab were also split. This article from 1947, by Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) Trotskyist Colin De Silva, discusses the stance on partition by the main bourgeois political groups in India — the Congress Party and the Muslim League. A terrible rupture and violence followed partition when 10-12 million people were displaced along religious lines.

When the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985, its author, Margaret Atwood, was concerned about the growing strength of Christian fundamentalism in US politics. Unfortunately her story is still very relevant, in fact more relevant, thirty years later.

The Conservative Party’s loss of their parliamentary majority has left Theresa May reliant on Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a hard-right organisation which has 10 MPs in the House of Commons. So who are the Tories’ new unionist bedfellows?

I am grateful to Martin Thomas for his response to my letter (Solidarity 439).Rather than seeking to avoid measures which would invite “a counter revolutionary reaction”, I was attempting to point out the very tight limits of social-democratic reformism, i.e. if you try and raise really serious amounts of revenue from the rich to pay for your reform programme, such a government will very quickly run into serious trouble.

An Indian socialist presents a view different from Solidarity’s on an attempt to get the Supreme Court to rule unconstitutional the practice of triple talaq (where a Muslim man can divorce his wife in minutes by saying the word talaq three times).

A Commission appointed by the Irish government to look into the mass burial of infants at a former “mother and baby” home has confirmed “significant quantities of human remains” have been found in the grounds of the home. The Commission was appointed in 2015 after historian Catherine Corless found death certificates for babies born at a home in Tuam, County Galway, but no burial records.

“Half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through its total incapacity to understand the march of mod ern history".

This description of reactionary, feudal "socialists" in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 fits Hizb-ut Tahrir perfectly.